ConvertKit Monthly Report — September 2016

Fall is upon us and so is growth. The month of September was filled with growth and improvements. We hope it’s been a good month for you too. As we grow, our customers grow. And that’s what’s most important to us. Posting our monthly numbers isn’t something we do because we have to, but because we want to share our stats with you intentionally.

The Stats

We crossed $400k this month!! As our revenue climbs, that means we are gaining more customers dedicated to growing their business. We feel honored to be apart of their entrepreneurial journey.

Net Revenue came in $18k lower than MRR for the month of September.

Our customer base crossed 8k this month! We are up to 8,364 customers.

Churn is always top of mind for us. As we are focusing on our revenue goals and customer growth, strategizing ways to keep churn low is a major priority. We are currently improving our on-boarding sequences and offering more training for new customers.

Part of our growth can be attributed to our Affiliate Program. Each Affiliate receives a 30% commission each month from everyone they refer. This past month, we paid over $46,000 in commissions spread across 125 affiliates.

Development

Our Engineers are some of the most talented people in the industry. They are working day and night to improve our features and app performance. David, our Lead Software Engineer, consistently posts in Engineering Updates if you want these updates in more detail.

CAPTCHAs

This past month saw many attacks from spammers. And a specific kind of spam called subscription bombing. In order to keep this from happening, we have put CAPTCHAs in place.

For your subscribers, the effects are pretty minimal. Based on the algorithms we use to determine when to display it, most of them will never see the CAPTCHA at all. They’ll go through the process just like they always have, with no inhibitions. A normal subscriber looks nothing like a robot to our system.

However, when you’re setting up a form on your website for the first time, you very well might see the CAPTCHA. This is alarming to many of our customers because they believe that all their subscribers are seeing this, but be assured that they aren’t. You can read more specifics about this here.

Improving deliverability

We’ve done a few different things here. First, we’ve switched out some IPs so that they’re not already on some blacklists. Second, we’re increasing our internal ability to modify sending domains and IPs (two big things that can get a message stopped for spam once reputation is damaged).

The other thing with deliverability is that we’re still small enough that we’ve often been able to help our customers directly over the past few weeks in the instances where messages didn’t hit the inbox.

Wrapping Up

Thank you all for your support! You are our number one priority and we strive towards better performance and high response times every day.
Have questions? Drop them in the comments below!